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Writer's picturemikeofthepalace

"The Architects of Memory" by Karen Osborne

The main character of this book is a space salvage operator. She had been indentured to a mega-corporation as a miner, but the planet she was working on was attacked by aliens, the company holding her indenture went under, and now she’s indentured to another mega-corp hoping to earn enough to pay off her debts, become a corporate citizen, and get needed medical treatment.


That is a truly horrible premise for a book. And one that doesn’t sound relevant to contemporary American society in any way at all. Certainly not.


Anyway, on reading the premise, I would’ve told Karen Osborne and Tor to shut up and take my money, but they were nice enough to give me an ARC in exchange for a review.


The main character is named Ash. She has a chronic medical condition, one with very expensive treatment. She needs to keep her condition hidden until she becomes a citizen and is entitled to treatment - if the Aurora corporation finds out about it before then, her hopes of earning her citizenship will disappear. This is complicated by the fact that her condition has the potential to greatly impair her on-the-job performance, which could be putting her and her shipmates in terrible danger given the nature of the work. Also complicating things is that Ash has a serious thing for the ship’s citizen-captain, who in turn herself has a serious thing for Ash. Things are tense but on track when Ash & company luck into a great find while stripping a damaged warship: an intact alien weapon with the potential to give Aurora absolutely dominant market share. Unsurprisingly, things get complicated.

What follows is an excellent science fiction story of bridging the gap to a very, very alien species. Ash makes discoveries about the nature of their alien enemies that put the war into an entirely new light. Meanwhile, Aurora, other companies, and some revolutionary factions are all scrambling to be the one to possess this strange alien artifact.


This entire book takes place over the course of a couple very tense days (which I’m discovering is something I really love when done well). There is a gradual reveal of what’s going on, and it’s layers within layers within layers that kept me wondering and turning one more page. It’s a real nail-biter in many ways.


This is listed on Goodreads as “The Memory War #1” which I find very interesting, because the ending (while excellent, and powerful, and heartbreaking) ties itself up in such a way that there’s no real need for a sequel. But I’m super curious to read one, because this was excellent.


Comes out on August 25.


Bingo categories: Published in 2020 [Hard Mode]; Big Dumb Object [Maybe Hard Mode? The alien artifact fits the Golden Age sci-fi definitions in most ways - early speculation about it is that it might be something to do with zero-point energy - but it’s about head-sized. /u/lrich1024, official ruling?]

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